NetWits

APRIL 2, 2011

We’re all focused on the non-profit space, but some times it’s good to take a look at how the internet is being used on a broader scale. It helps give us perspective and challenges our thinking which leads to potentially making decisions differently. So here’s a few recent stats for you to chew on … 78% of Internet users conduct product research online. 78% of business people use their mobile device to check email. 40% of US smartphone owners compare prices on their mobil

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Nonprofit Tech for Good

APRIL 21, 2011

It took 2 years, 10 months, and 50,000 clicks of a mouse, but yesterday @ NonprofitOrgs followed its 50,000th nonprofit on Twitter! I start each morning browsing those that followed @ NonprofitOrgs the day and night before, and follow those that are nonprofits and nonprofit staff in return. There a handful of nonprofit service providers in there too.

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Amy Sample Ward

APRIL 11, 2011

Last week, I had a lot of fun test-driving Qriously , a new application that replaces advertisements on smart phones with questions, creating real-time feedback about the topics you are interested in. I had so much fun, in fact, that I shared screen shots and some thoughts around the way organizations could put a tool like this to use. (If you missed it, here’s last week’s post about Qriously.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 25, 2011

By Web Server Software, I mean the software used to serve websites/pages. This includes databases, operating systems and other software that is involved in that process. On the proprietary side, there are two options. Proprietary Unix, and Microsoft Windows, and associated Microsoft Software. The current version of MS Server in use is Server 2008. Microsoft has web server software called IIS , and it’s database server product is MS SQL server , which people use for far more than just servi

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Speaker: Andrew Olsen, CFRE - EVP, Fundraising Solutions at DickersonBakker | Kat Landa, CFRE, CSD - SVP, Talent Solutions at DickersonBakker

Across the nonprofit sector, organizations invest heavily in donor retention efforts, yet the struggle of cultivating lasting relationships remains. While attracting new donors is crucial, the lack of repeat donors poses significant financial risks. Through a comprehensive analysis of industry data, experts argue that there is a direct correlation between donor burnout, donor retention, and the talent retention crisis.

Donor

Judi Sohn

APRIL 28, 2011

Now that our rebranding is off the ground, we've finally implemented something in Salesforce I've wanted to do for a long time.a welcome series of emails to new contacts. Until recently, when someone registered through our website without donating or taking action, they got very little initial feedback from us. They just started hearing from us when we sent out email enewsletters, appeals or action alerts.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

APRIL 6, 2011

One of the great memories I have of last week's Skoll World Forum is Willy Foote of Root Capital kicking off the Skoll Convening (the grantee meeting just before the Forum) with this ash-cloud inspired song: “Floating in this Cloud” How can I scale the impact of my work? Should I partner or go it alone? How many funders do I really need? And how many miles have I flown?

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Nonprofit Tech for Good

APRIL 7, 2011

Integrating your nonprofit’s Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 campaigns is essential for success in online communications and fundraising. Rather that keeping them separate, once they are merged to compliment one another, your nonprofit’s ROI begins to grow exponentially. To begin, here are five ways to integrate social media into your nonprofit’s website: 1) Add social networking icons to your homepage.

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Amy Sample Ward

APRIL 5, 2011

Last week, the New York Times ran an article exploring a segment of the nonprofit/social impact sector that the author saw as a small minority of organizations, but one I care deeply about: those that plan to go out of business. The article featured Malaria No More, and their vision of the project’s work: to end Malaria. Here’s an excerpt: Most notable, perhaps, is Malaria No More, a popular nonprofit that supplies bed nets in malaria zones.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 12, 2011

I was perusing Social Source Commons (something I don’t do nearly often enough,) and catching up on the SSC blog , and I thought it might be worth sharing with this audience what tools I use for basic consulting workflow. I’ll do another few posts for other areas, like development, system maintenance, personal web presence, and writing. (If you want to look at my Social Source Commons toolbox, it’s here.

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Robert Weiner

APRIL 2, 2011

For those of you who noticed some strange posts here lately, please accept my apologies. My blog automatically scoops up anything I write on TechSoup's blog. TechSoup just launched a new blog and it messed up my automated scooper-upper. I've been deleting the posts when they appear while trying to fix the problem. In the meantime I've turned off this feature.

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Speaker: Tim Sarrantonio

The average nonprofit uses five or more different software platforms to create their donor’s journey, making the experience clunky and disjointed. If you want to design a magical online giving experience for donors, making their journey as seamless as possible is key. In this webinar with expert Tim Sarrantonio, you’ll learn the fundamental steps to create an immersive and personalized online giving experience for your donors.

Donor

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

APRIL 7, 2011

Thanks to commenter Differance bringing up in response to to our last post on this topic that made me want to take a new tack. You're absolutely right that information quality comes from people and that data's fitness for a particular purpose is very contextual. To continue in this direction, let’s look at how people use this information. The people who are in most need of information about humanitarian disasters are the organized responders.

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NetWits

APRIL 12, 2011

Petri Darby is the Director of Brand Marketing & Digital Strategy at Make-A-Wish Foundation of America. He blogs at darbyDARNIT. And he’s an all around funny guy (I love the one where he’s reading O Magazine). I had a chance to spend time with Petri at SXSW this year where we talked about how Make-a-Wish Foundation of American is using social media as part of their digital strategy.

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Nonprofit Tech for Good

APRIL 4, 2011

Unlike the Q&A site Quora, Facebook Questions allows brands to ask and answer questions. On Quora you have to be a person, but Facebook Questions uses your nonprofit’s Page and avatar as your Facebook Questions identity. Quora is great for professionals and those that want to spend time building their personal brand online, but I think Facebook’s decision to allow brands to use Questions was smart.

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Amy Sample Ward

APRIL 27, 2011

My latest contribution to the Stanford Social Innovation Review is up. Read the post below or visit SSIR to read and comment with that community. —– I’ve recently shared a couple interviews exploring two case studies of really successful online fundraising campaigns: SXSW4Japan Raises Over $120,000 and $100,000 in Three Days with #TeamAutism.

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Advertiser: Digital Ocean

Effectively managing cloud technology is getting more complex. From cybersecurity concerns, vendor lock-in, cost increases, or lack of transparency on costs, it can quickly get out of control. Knowing what you can control and finding a platform that’s built with nonprofits in mind is key.

Nonprofit

Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 7, 2011

There are some very interesting comparisons to make in this realm, and, I’d say first off, that the proprietary tools are in the lead, for sure. I’ll start with basic graphics – graphic manipulation tools. Of course, on the proprietary side is the ever present and predominant Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. And, honestly, they are very good tools, and considered industry standards.

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Wild Apricot

APRIL 20, 2011

You’ll find a variety of tech tools in this 2-part series, from volunteer and member management, to web publishing and document sharing, to back office tasks, project management, and more.( read more ).

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

APRIL 16, 2011

We had a Bookshare all-hands meeting this week, where our entire team gets together and talks about the latest activities and news about the Bookshare project. One piece of news struck me as being particularly poignant. Melanie Sorensen, who had recently joined the Bookshare Advisory Board, suddenly passed away last month. She missed what was supposed to be her first in-person board meeting because she had the flu.

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NetWits

APRIL 26, 2011

If you’ve been around the non-profit social media scene for any amount of time you’ve probably heard of (or even met) Danielle Brigida from the National Wildlife Federation (NWF). As the Digital Marketing Manager at NWF she responsible for running NWF’s social media program – Yes, the one that’s been talked about all over the web by such publications as USA Today , The Nonprofit Times , Fast Company , Washington Post , Mashable , GreenTalk Radio , and Fundr

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Advertiser: Syncrony

Looking for cost reductions for your nonprofit? Why not consider modernizing with a digital board management system that's designed to work with remote meetings, with immediate cost reductions if you still distribute paper packets to members? Get going in less than an hour on a fully hosted cloud solution built on the latest technology that runs on any device - from desktops to tablets and smartphones - without any installation.

Nonprofit

Nonprofit Tech for Good

APRIL 18, 2011

The number of low-cost or free, web-based resources and tools available to nonprofits today is astounding. So much so that many nonprofit professionals are overwhelmed by the all choices – and as the Mobile Web and related start-ups continue to grow, prepare to be mind-boggled by all the new technology options available to your nonprofit in coming years.

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Amy Sample Ward

APRIL 5, 2011

Last month, at the 2011 Nonprofit Technology Conference , I had the opportunity to run the Community-Driven Social Impact game in a session workshop. The room was full, and participants came up with some terrific examples and options for their organizations. One of the participants was Ericha Hager, the Regional Collaborative Coordinator for Community Media Access Partnership.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 3, 2011

HipHop for PHP. tags: php webdev toblog opensource. MailChimp | drupal.org. tags: drupal modules toblog. [link]. tags: CMS opensource report toblog. CUBRID – Open Source Database Management System Optimized for Web. tags: opensource database toblog. Hudson Continuous Integration. tags: testing java toblog webdev. Open Source ETL designed to bridge the gap between business and IT. | Kettle Project: Pentaho Data Integration. tags: opensource etl data integration toblog.

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NCE Social Media

APRIL 14, 2011

Here is a short video from Constant Contact on the challenges tackling social media and the metrics that are important, especially as you start using social media. The speaker discusses small business but it can easily be interchanged with nonprofit organization. What have been some of your struggles?

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Advertiser: DonorDock

Are your donors your biggest fans, or are you lacking donor loyalty? The truth is, your donors have expectations of what their relationship with your organization should look like. This ebook will help you learn how to live up to those expectations!

Donor

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

APRIL 15, 2011

Skoll Awards Reception , a photo by Skoll World Forum on Flickr. I'm talking with Quratul Ain Bakhteari at the Skoll World Forum about the incredibly difficult work she does in Pakistan.

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NetWits

APRIL 1, 2011

Mark Horvath is a passionate guy with an incredible story. He goes by the name Hardly Normal and fights to put a face on homelessness by using the internet, social media and InvisiblePeople.TV (content can be intense) to share stories about real people battling with being out on the street. If you ever doubted the power of the social web or questioned it’s potential to create true impact, spend some time checking out what Mark has helped do.

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Nonprofit Tech for Good

APRIL 25, 2011

In March 2011 Facebook disabled the popular Static FMBL App that many nonprofits had used to create custom tabs on their Facebook Pages. Rather than having their apps be based on FBML, Facebook has now switched over to iframes. Those nonprofits that have already created custom tabs using the Static FBML app will continue to be supported (not indefinitely, however), but those that want create custom tabs for the first time or switch over to iframes have a few new apps to experiment with, namely S

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Amy Sample Ward

APRIL 7, 2011

South by Southwest ( SXSW ) Interactive is a conference, that takes place each Spring in Austin, TX, with over 20,000 web influencers, emerging tech, and creatives. Last month, the Japan earthquake and tsunami occurred on March 11th 2011, the first day of the conference. SXSWcares , co-branded as SXSW4Japan, was a campaign that rallied the SXSW community to raise awareness and harness support for disaster relief.

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Organizations like yours are increasingly realizing that technology adoption is only as good as the technology you choose. Statistics from a 2014 NTEN study show that seriously investing resources in training for your staff corresponds to higher adoption and ultimately technology effectiveness. In this report, we’ll give you a high-level overview of how to get your organization in shape for technology adoption and best practices for facilitating this critical process.

Nonprofit

Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 25, 2011

Since I am a web developer, the core of my development workflow is, for sure, a browser. But not just one browser, or any browser. Several. Chrome has become my everyday browser, although Firefox is making its way back into my heart, now that Firefox 4 is so lean and zippy. But I am very often in both. I use Opera on occasion, and, of course, I use IE only when I absolutely have to (and it generally means rebooting into Windows, which I do less and less these days.).

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NCE Social Media

APRIL 22, 2011

Yesterday, Amazon had a server problem for their cloud-based clients. You can read more about it here. What does that have to do with social media? Well, several social media sites like HootSuite , SCVNGR , Reddit , Quora and Foursquare use Amazon’s services to host their content. So, when Amazon’s cloud server went down, some social media sites did too.

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Wild Apricot

APRIL 21, 2011

This is the second in our 2-part series listing a variety of tech tools non-profits can use, from volunteer and member management, to fundraising, to website creation, community building, collaboration, and more.( read more ).

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NetWits

APRIL 6, 2011

Meet Patty Huber. She leads social innovation at Groupon – the daily deals site that’s been given the title of “ fastest growing web company ever “ If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of daily deals here’s a simple way to think of it: “You and thousands of other subscribers opt-in to receive daily deals of 50% or more off on food, clothes, gyms, theme parks, etc, and the daily deal company (in this case Groupon) send businesses ton of new customers.&#

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